Please - Odhikar

combined with the fact that no independent investigation power has been given amounts to a
sever lacunae in effective intervention for rights'abuse.
Limitation of the Code of Criminal Procedure, Indian Penal Code and Indian Evidence
Act in Dealing with Mass Crimes:
1. Failure of Criminal Justice system
2. Failure of intelligence
3. Preventive Arrests
4. Police participation in the riots
5. Illegal registration of FIRs (Problems with FIRs)
a) their failure to record First Information Reports (FIRs) and in fact fie omnibus;
b) police complicity in not naming the accused despite repeated insistence of the
victim/survivors that all accused should be named;
c) worst of all, their insistence on recording omnibus FIRs for whole areas, regions and
towns instead of separate detailed ones for every crime and offence committed.
Section 154 of the CrPC deals with the First Information Report of cognisable offences and is
the first crucial step in prosecution of offenders.
A. Omnibus FIRs
It is a fundamental principle of criminal law that every offence needs to be separately registered,
investigated and tried. Filing omnibus FIRs is one of the simplest ways of avoiding detailed
investigations and effective trials. In many cases in Gujarat where 80 or 90 shops have been
burnt or a large number of people have been killed, instead of filing separate FIRs in respect of
each incident, the police has registered collective FIRs thus virtually scuttling the possibility of
detailed investigation or conviction. Apart from this, many incidents separated over time
(sometimes days) and place and concerning different victims and accused have been clubbed
together. Moreover, when individuals came forward to lodge their FIRs, they were told the FIRs
have already been recorded, and that no second FIR was possible.
B. FIRs without names of accused
Most of the FIRs which have been filed, especially where police is the informant, do not contain
the names of the accused and only say that an unidentified mob attacked. There are significant
number of cases where the victims actually named the accused but the Gujarat police have
refused to lodge their names in the FIRs. Instead, the police took on the role of a partisan
intermediary in evidence recorded from Naroda, Chamanpura, Odh, Sardarpura, Bharuch,
Ankleshwar, Varodara, Mehsana, Himmatnagar, Sabarkantha and Banaskantha. In these cases,
the police told the complainants that the FIR would be lodged only if the name of the accused is
deleted. For example, at village Por, 3 women and 3 children were killed. The victims have
identified and named 95 attackers but the police refused to include their names in the FIRs The
detailed area wise list of incidents is covered by the Tribunal in the section on 'Summary of
Evidence'.
Report 2005
177